Eu lhe alembro a você: about the space of vossa mercê and você in the history of Portuguese

Abstract

The change in politeness rules affects and reconfigures the treatment system of a given language. Finding scarce primary sources, such as the 16^th and 17^th century manuscripts, allows us to study, in addition to the forms of treatment, the formation of a new politeness agreement. This new agreement is based on a new society that began to be formed in American Portuguese.in the middle of the 16^th century The indices of this new system are the forms vossa mercê and você. The arrangements made at the beginning of the colonization process affected the courtesy forms and functions of what would become the Brazilian Portuguese (BP),  which are the reasons why this paper emphasizes the 16^th and 17^th centuries. We investigate in this article (a) manuscripts produced between 16th and 17^th centuries that have never been analysed by the perspective of the Portuguese’s address system and (b) the use of vossa mercê and você in literary texts and in metalinguistic sources. In the end of the paper, final observations are made in the light of the proposed research. One of the contributions made by this study is the register of the terminus a quo of the word você, which dates from the year 1638. We argue for the interdisciplinarity of Philology, Paleography and Historical Linguistics studies and for the constitution of an effective dialogue between the state collective projects that investigate the BP history, considering its common socio-history.